Well if you don't know the megawad Sunder, it's a Doom 2 megawad built around two things, impressive architecture and slaughterfest gameplay. I've watched both of these concepts evolve quite well in many other wads, and Sunder, despite still being unfinished, is a wad that takes both of these out of the ballpark. There are large pieces of macro-architecture strewn throughout Sunder, immaculately made to give not only a sense of design but also an impressive sense of scale. Many a time while playing you wonder if, and also when, you'll be entering those new bits of archtecture. At the same time, Sunder implements slaughterfest-style gameplay, some of it in Ribbiks-like setpieces where you're more or less in cramped locations against tough battles, usually a cyberdemon or what not in close quarters. The author does in fact manage the difficulty to be as hard as possible on each map, despite there not being any difficulty settings whatsoever.
And for years, Sunder has impressed many, until they found out that it stopped after MAP14. You know what they say, they wanted more. They thought the crazed platforming segments, macro-architecture, hexagon-hallways, and grandiose battles were satisfying, but of course they wanted more and more, and it didn't take until 2019 to see a resurgence of Insane_Gazebo, the author of Sunder, to finally make a return in an attempt to finish the megawad. Of course, his style is to map each new map one at a time, and universally the screenshots are impressive. But that leads matters to the gameplay.
One of the main drawbacks to such impressive architecture-centric megawads is "will this properly run on my computer?" Yeah, I'm talking about how much something can lag, either due to the amount of lines drawn in, or perhaps the amount of things in the map. When MAP15 came, it was unplayable for me until I tinkered with the settings quite a bit, putting the rendering down to software mode and scaling a few other nuances so that the map can actually be playable in some way. Lag and slaughterfest just will not mix, no matter how you go through it. MAP31 proved to not lag, thankfully, and neither did MAP18 when it came out. MAP16 and MAP17 both were mostly decent grand-scale levels that had minimal lags, while MAP15, apart from a few notable areas, was manageable. This left MAP32 and the newest map, MAP19, as a few troubling parts where no matter what I was destined for death by lag and slaughter, and to me that will definitely limit the playability.
These maps are much larger than any of the other ones, with MAP19 of the two hitting the linedef limit, clearly going overboard with the design worked nicely but factoring in gameplay and you gotta make sure what we have to go through can chug through it. I also have to wonder if ZDoom-compatible ports just have problems with these maps, because the most recommended port is GLBoom, and I for one would absolutely love for Sunder, a Boom-compatible wad, to be playable in all Boom-compatible ports including the ZDoom ones. The main trouble spots where gameplay nearly halted were at the big outside fountain area and the hedge maze in MAP32, and the end battles after getting the BFG9000 in MAP19. These not only are the hardest and largest fights in their respective levels, they are the ones where I need the most strategy, but that is next to impossible if I can barely even move. In my opinion, I'm hoping that future Sunder maps don't suffer as much as this, so they should lower the linedef limit and maybe the number of things as well. MAP05 was a map that not only doesn't break even 200 monsters for its kill count, but also manages to still make it tough, so a map like that would be quite welcome.
This brings me to my other point about Sunder's new direction I'm not a fan of, level length. Ever since MAP15 started showing up, many of the maps took well over 40 minutes, to an hour for the much later maps, with MAP19 an expected time of perhaps 2 to 3 hours to finish properly. Sunder is already made to be a marathon megawad due to its slaughter gameplay prevalent in almost every map, especially with many different themes tackled. To make the maps themselves 3-hour marathons will not only heavily limit those without the patience, but make all those fancy demos so much harder to do. Only recently did I see a non-TAS demo of MAP15, I must imagine just how painstaking it was, especially if a fall in an inescapable pit ruins a run, and Sunder is rife with them. On the much longer maps, without a single save on a demo attempt, I can only imagine the extreme frustration someone has for falling in, wasting hours of gameplay. So yeah, Sunder needs to pipe down with level length, a median of at least an hour per level works fine enough.
That's just my take on Sunder's new direction and I'm happy for the new maps, but criticism has to be made about them.
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